Lately, however, enthusiasm for the task of
supporting Itanium has waned andseveral
software partners have jumped ship, including Oracle Corp. (ORCL).
Most recently, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)
and Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)
announced that they would be killing support for Itanium in future versions of
their operating systems.

With no clear OS provider lined up, some have
speculated that Intel may preemptively kill Itanium and focus efforts on its
Xeon line.

But in the wake of its most recent Xeon launch,
Kirk Skaugen, VP and general manager for Intel's Data Center group,commentedat a
press conference, "Instead of Itanium at the top and Xeon at the bottom of
the lineup, we're going to have them side by side."

I. An Inglorious History

Whereas the Xeon line -- the direct server
counterpart to Intel's consumer PC chips -- was widely lauded, Itanium was
negatively received since its launch.

But the project just didn't turn out well.
When Intel released its first Itanium design, codenamed Merced in
2001, it only mustered half the performance of Intel's mainline consumer/server
architecture of the time, Pentium 4. And according to some reports, x86
emulation tools were so poor that the chip performed like a 100 MHz
first-generation Pentium processor.

Undeterred, Intel mustered onward. Firmly
behind it was the world's largest computer maker, Hewlett-Packard, Comp. (HPQ).
Not only did HP build Itanium systems and try to push them in the
corporate IT ecosystem, but it also began to co-develop the chips with Intel.

The first joint design was the "Itanium
2" codenamedMcKinley, released in 2002, built at 180 nm.
In 2003 Intel released a 130 nm Itanium 2, codenamedMadison.

Then it began to make big claims in 2005 about a
design calledTukwila, which would not only pack four cores but
would also replace Itanium's bus. At the time Intel's first generation
PC-side Core architecture (codenamedConroe/Merom) was still a year away, so
this claim sounded pretty exciting.

Sales reflected this poor performance. In
2007 8.4 million x86 servers were sold, but only 55,000 Itanium servers
shipped, according to Gartner, Inc. This was bad, even for RISC-servers,
which shipped 417,000 units in total.

While exact numbers are sketchy at best, due to
lack of official reporting, it is estimated that Itanium was heavily outsold by
Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle) SPARC chips and International Business
Machines' (IBM)
POWER architecture.

In February 2010Tukwila finally
landed, officially branded theItanium
9300 Series. Three years late, the processor still sportedsome
tempting featureslike double-device data correction to prevent
memory corruption. These features made it a promise buy for
mission-critical applications.

But for the mass market,Tukwila was
late to the party and lacked the performance to truly impress

A 4-core Itanium processor clocked at 1.73 GHz
costs $3,838 USD per chip in quantities of 1,000, while the newly released
10-core 2.4 GHz Xeon E7-2870 costs $4,227 USD, in quantities of 1,000 (note:
due to the different architectures, the clock speeds are not directly
comparable).

Given the comparable price it's hard to see the
merits of Itanium, which packs less cores, other than from an error-correction/mission-critical
standpoint. Given the vanishing software support for the platform, the picture
becomes even dimmer for the platform.

Intel is promising a cheery outlook forthe
future of Itanium. Mr. Skaugen bragged that the next generation Itanium
core, codenamedPoulson, would bring 8 cores built at 32 nm and
more than double the performance of the Itanium 9300 Series.

And an even more distant chip, codenamedKittsonis also
reportedly being worked on.

The problem is that evenWestmere-EX is
a questionable proposition. Given the availability of 12-core
Opteron 6168 chipsfor $750/USD, the much more expensive 10-core E7-2870
becomes a tenuous buy.

And even among Intel processors, the E7-2870's
higher cost per core count is cause for pause, given that there are far cheaperSandy
Bridge-based quad-core Xeon chips (the recently released E3 Series).
The situation is complicated slightly by the fact that some software is
still licensed on a per-chip basis, meaning that the E7 chips would yield a net savingsif you
look exclusively at Intel's offerings.

Given the switch of many software vendors to
per-core (rather than per-chip) licensing, the E7 may find less traction,
though, than its E3 series brethren.

And the situation is even worse forTukwila,
which is even more expensive and by Intel's own admission trails the E3 and E7
series in performance.

III. Intel and HP -- Resigned to go Down With
the Ship?

Given the poor outlook, it seems pretty incredible
that Intel would continue to devote resources to the eternally disappointing
Itanium project. The project recently observed its 10-year anniversary,
but given how Intel's ever-shrinking sales predictions continue to overestimate
the Itanium 's dismal real-world sales, it was hardly cause for the chipmaker
to celebrate.

With the SPARC and POWER RISC-style architectures
deeply entrenched and ahungry
ARM coalitionwaiting in the ranks Itanium's future is not bright.

But Intel has clearly stated that it remains loyal
to its post and will stand by the platform for years to come -- even if it
continues to sink.

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